1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to incident management for technical support services, more specifically, to an enhanced problem determination and resolution technique.
2. Description of the Related Art
Problem determination and resolution (PDR) is the process of detecting anomalies in a monitored system, locating the problems responsible for the issue, determining the root cause of the problem and fixing the cause of the problem. Thus, identifying the type of problem and the cause of the problem are important aspects in searching for the relevant fix.
However, identifying the root cause of the problem is not always a simple task. For example, a user may experience a front-end issue and search for fixes related to front-end problems while, in reality, the issue is being caused by a back-end problem. Thus, the problem that a user experiences may be only the effect of an underlying issue within the IT environment and the fixes found are not addressing the root cause. These situations are becoming more common, especially when dealing with software problems in multi-tier IT environment with complex system dependencies. An example of such a multi-tier environment is an e-business system which is supported by an infrastructure consisting of the following subsystems connected by local and wide area networks; web based presentation services, access services, application business logic, messaging services, database services and storage subsystems.
Although there are existing solutions that try to provide problem determination, these solutions are limited in their application. For example, some solutions in the prior art are problem specific and, as such, lack the potential of being applied to wide array of issues. In other words, these solutions can only determine one specific type of problem (e.g., only network problems, only hardware problems, only storage area network [SAN] problems, only database problems, only peripheral component interconnect redundant array of inexpensive disks [PCI RAID] problems or only web problems) and are not effective in searching for any other type of problem.
In addition, some prior art methodologies use only one type of the available information (e.g., only logs or only performance metrics). Thus, these solutions may be ignoring information that may be relevant to the problem at hand. Furthermore, some prior art solutions provide a particular approach to the PDR technology that is applicable only in specific scenarios (e.g.: dependencies, probes, data and tools federation, probes in code/program classes) and not applicable in other scenarios.
Moreover, existing problem classification solutions for problem determination usually involve human testers for annotation judgment, namely a semi-supervised approach, which labor intensive. Recent approaches that try to automate the classification process either define a set of rules, preset a set of threshold for monitoring, lean from preset attribute vectors or statistically analyze historical data. All of the above approaches use a flat structure of the taxonomy when it comes to classify the problem instance. The flat structure has scalability limitations when the problem space becomes large, which is the case of complex modern IT environments.